There are many speculations about the origin of Dionysus, the God of wine and fertility, as well as for the origin of Orpheus.
With this publication we’ll try to give some basic explanation on the origin of the God of wine – Dionysus.
“In earliest pre-literate times the proto-Thracians had an impact on the formation ancient mythology of the vast number of western civilization nations, which accelerated the technological advances leading to emergence of one of the earliest industrial wine-making centers. Wild grapes naturally grow widely in areas where the earliest centers of human civilization emerged and since there were a few in numbers, cultivation of grapes had likely originated in several places independently. First grape cultivation attempts had to meet certain conditions: situated within the zone of wild grapes natural habitat, meet specific climatic and weather conditions, prove emergence and use of certain words in linguistic system of given territory, indicating to the production and consumption of wine. Since what causes a plant to be noticed and cultivated is its religious value, the key to such search would be the degree of religious and spiritual life of an ancient society with early differentiation of the deities, in which wine becomes a separate and important ritual component. If we stipulate the premise that the better wine-making is developed, the greater is the likelihood of inclusion in the pantheon of a deity with special affinity to wine and wine-making, one should seek the territory where a god of wine appeared for the first time. In this situation it is possible to assert with the defined confidence that the earliest religious belief associated specifically with wine was the cult of Dionysus, commonly known in archaic Aegean world and Balkans. However, according to Herodotus and other ancient Greek writers, demigod Dionysus was of Thracian origin, being the son of the god Zeus and earthly woman Semele. Various written documents of ancient Greece tell the story of a legendary mythical demigod, but at the same time in the image of Dionysus one can see traces of a real historical figure.”
Source: “To the origins of the cult of Dionysus” by Henry Shephard, Philadelphia 2008
